Restoring the tsunami damaged reef in Thailand
Posted: Thursday, April 24, 2008 1:50 PM
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
PHI PHI ISLANDS, Thailand – Andrew Hewett fished a small fragment of coral from a bucket of water and held it between his fingers.
"It's been knocked off, broken by an anchor or somebody standing on it," he said, explaining that while the devastating 2004 tsunami caused a lot of damage to the area's coral reefs, the bigger threat to the reefs comes not from nature, but from man.
He then showed how to drill a small hole in the fragment and attach it to a metal rack. Moments later, a production line was up and running on the deck of the dive boat, students threading hundreds of fragments and pulling them tightly to the racks.
"If I can't pull it off, then a fish certainly can't," said Nichole Niewald, a biology major at the University of Missouri.
The fragments had been collected from the ocean floor, the remains of a badly damaged reef.
"Day by day people are walking on the reef, not paying enough attention, and not treating the coral like the animals they actually are," said Steve Monson, who studies food science at Mizzou.
Eighteen students and staff traveled from Missouri to the Phi Phi islands in Thailand to take part in a pioneering coral rehabilitation project. Their trip was organized by Bob Sites, Professor of Entomology at Mizzou's Division of Plant Sciences, a regular visitor to the Kingdom. It's the second year he's brought students to the coral project. All the students are from Mizzou's College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources
Read the rest of Ian Williams blog about Restoring the Reef in the Daily Nightly blog.
